Digital Analytics

Using analytics to find conversion opportunities | CXL Course Review

If you don’t know how to read data, why bother collecting it?

Illustration: unDraw

“Using analytics to find conversion opportunities” is the third course in the CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Program.

The instructor of this CXL course is Jeff Sauer, once known as Jeffalytics, now Data Driven.

The duration of the course is 1 hour and during that time you’ll learn about how to better understand your audience, determine appropriate goals and filters, use segments and secondary dimensions, and interpret potential errors in your data.

I did learn all that and much more!, but I have an obligation to give my honest impression.

And that impression is: this course was made in a hurry.

Audio is of somewhat low quality, and currently, without a transcript. That means if you’re looking for some particular part of the lesson you’ll have to guess where it is. Also, no lesson slides this time.

It seems like this is the only course with similar problems. I have to assume it is a temporary problem and it will be fixed any time soon.

Summary:

• Getting started: using goals to quantify outcomes
• Evaluating traffic quality
• Metrics that matter (and some that don’t)
• Secondary dimensions and advanced segments
• Spotting conversion opportunities
• Building advanced segments
• Custom segments
• Event tracking
• Auditing your analytics
• Conclusion

Getting started: using goals to quantify outcomes

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Lewis Carrol

If you don’t know your goals, anything you see in your reports can look like winning. If you don’t set your goals in Google Analytics, your report won’t show any value. And with no value, those reports are useless for analysis.

Setting Goals can be overwhelming. You have to choose the right value, and sometimes you don’t have all the information needed to calculate it. So, what’s the solution?

Goal types include:

• Destination
• Session duration
• Pages/screens per session
• Event

In a video on YouTube named How Do You Choose a Google Analytics Goal Value? Jeff will help you find an answer.

Note: With the free version of Google Analytics, you can use up to 20 goals.

Beware: You can’t delete a goal, you can only repurpose it!

Evaluating traffic quality

Google Analytics Audit explains traffic quality. We learned why to filter out bots and other junk traffic.

Most of the time we don’t want to see bot traffic in our Analytics reports, because, well, bots are not humans.

Heavy bot traffic is considered 5% of the session or more, and it can do real harm to metrics.

For further reading: How To Identify And Remove Bot Traffic In Google Analytics.

Metrics that matter (and some that don’t)

Fundamental page-level metrics are:

• Bounce rate,
• Page value, and
• Secondary Dimensions.

A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
Bounce rate — Analytics Help

Question of all questions:

Is a high bounce rate always a bad sign?

Well, yes AND no.

You can have a high conversion rate AND a high bounce rate simultaneously.

But, a high bounce rate often indicates something very important: you haven’t made clear the next step you want the user to take.

To find a solution for a (too) high bounce rate, you’ll have to dig deep into Google Analytics. Is the overall bounce rate too high, or it’s just some pages, or categories, or a channel?

Niel Patel has a useful article about bounce rate and an even more useful infographic:

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/bounce-rate/

Page Value is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an Ecommerce transaction (or both). This value is intended to give you an idea of which page in your site contributed more to your site’s revenue.

If the page wasn’t involved in an e-commerce transaction for your website in any way, then the Page Value for that page will be $0 since the page was never visited in a session where a transaction occurred.

Jeff explained Page Value as:

(it is) how you measure the monetary performance of your web pages in Google Analytics.

Here are some things to keep in mind when looking at your Page Value:

1. Page Value is always higher for cart pages
2. If your Page Value is $0 across the board, you need goals. Without Goals, you won’t have useful page values. So set up your Goals!
3. If individual pages have low value, UPGRADE THEM. One way to improve a low-value page is to offer a content upgrade. Using lead magnets or email opt-ins can help you increase the value of your most popular content.

Read more about Page Value In Google Analytics on Jeff’s website.

Secondary dimensions and advanced segments

As we learned in Google Analytics for Beginners, a Secondary Dimension is an extra dimension you can add to a report for a more specific analysis.

Advanced segments are a more thorough way to look at your website data.

A segment is a subset of your Analytics data. Visitors from the specific city are a segment. Visitors of a specific page are also a segment. You can draw segments in countless ways.

Note: A single segment should aim to cover between five and fifty percent of your website’s viewers.

Spotting conversion opportunities

Conversion opportunities lay in identifying every pattern in your website:

• How a user arrives at your website
• Where user lands
• Structure of landing page
• Each step along the sales funnel
• Identifying shopping cart problems

By researching those problems or problem areas you’ll be able to get more conversions.

Building advanced segments

How do we know which segments to use?

Jeff recommends a few particular segments:

• Compare and contrast system reports — these are the ones we all have in our Google Analytics account. For example, we can compare Bounce Session vs. Converters.
• Compare mobile vs. desktop.

Custom segments

You can create segments based on:

• demographics,
• technology,
• behavior,
• date of the first session,
• traffic sources, or
• enhanced eCommerce.

Advanced settings are a condition. For example, filter sessions by source/medium that contains google / organic. You can include filter condition in sampling, or exclude it.

Event tracking

The goal of this lesson is to explain what GA tracks “out of the box”, and what needs to be managed on a more manual level.

Scroll Depth — A Google Analytics plugin for measuring page scrolling

Auto outbound link tracking

Auditing your analytics

Basic must-do would be:

• See if Google Products are linked
• Check for self-referral exclusion
• Review Filters
• Ecommerce Setup

More about Google Analytics Audit in my previous course review.

Conclusion

Jeff is a great instructor, and even with bad audio and no transcript, I was able to get so much from this course.

Hopefully, it will be re-done by the end of my journey, and I’ll be in a position to go through it one more time (and edit this post with new info).

What’s great about this course is that videos are up to 7 minutes long. That makes them easy to follow and absorb, and you can watch them over whenever there’s a need to.